page_title: Nationality Rooms
section_title: Polish
hierarchical_section_title: Nationality Rooms / Classrooms / Polish
caption_attribution_description: English: Polish Nationality Room in the Cathedral of Learning at the University of Pittsburgh This is an image of a place or building that is listed on the National Register of Historic Places in the United States of America. Its reference number is 75001608
context_page_description: The Nationality Rooms are a collection of 31 classrooms in the University of Pittsburgh's Cathedral of Learning depicting and donated by the national and ethnic groups that helped build the city of Pittsburgh. The rooms are designated as a Pittsburgh History and Landmarks Foundation historical landmark and are located on the 1st and 3rd floors of the Cathedral of Learning, itself a national historic landmark, on the University of Pittsburgh's main campus in the Oakland neighborhood of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States. Although of museum caliber, 29 of the 31 rooms are regularly used as functional classrooms that are utilized daily by University of Pittsburgh faculty and students, while the other two are mostly used as display rooms viewed through glass doors and are otherwise utilized primarily for special events and can only be explored via special guided tour. The Nationality Rooms also serve in a vigorous program of intercultural involvement and exchange in which the original organizing committees for the individual rooms remain as participants and includes a program of annual student scholarship to facilitate study abroad.
context_section_description: The Polish Classroom was inspired by rooms in Cracow's Wawel Castle, for centuries the residence of kings. The Polish astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus, and the science that his theories revolutionized, are also a major theme of the room. A replica of the famous Jan Matejko portrait of Copernicus shows him as a young man pursuing his study of the universe from a workshop on the roof of his uncle's house in Allenstein (Olsztyn). In the bay stands an enlarged replica of the 16th-century Jagiellonian globe, one of the oldest existing globes to depict North America as a separate continent. The original globe was only eight inches high and was designed to operate as a clock and calendar. It took a metalsmith in Cracow five years to complete the large globe in this room.
  Artists from Cracow also came to Pittsburgh to paint the ceiling of 18-foot (5.5 m) beams with informal geometric Renaissance decorations. The room is illuminated by a bronze chandelier bearing a stylized Polish eagle. The walnut seminar table was copied from one in a state dining room at Wawel Castle. The windows combine hexagonal handmade roundels, similar to those in Wawel Castle, with stained-glass coats of arms representing Polish institutions of higher education. The cornerstone is a fragment of Gothic cornice preserved from the Collegium Maius (1369), the ancient Jagiellonian Library. Poland's music is represented by the original manuscript of Ignace Paderewski's only opera, Manru, which is displayed in the archive cabinet.
caption: The Polish Classroom
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